Music PC

Hello,

my PC needs an upgrade, and since my harddisk died yesterday, this is
the moment. At the moment i've got a Celeron 500, which i build my
self years ago, and it worked great. Now i want to build a AMD athlon
XP based system. I'm a student, so the amd 64 is too expensive for
me....

I can get a cheap amd athlon xp 2600+ (333 fsb) processor, and i have
read good reviews about it....but my problem is which motherboard to
choose. I was thinking of a Asus a7n8x (deluxe)...with the nForce2
chipset.

Now i got some questions:

- Does anyone have suggestions or alternatives? I use mu PC for normal
work, but especially for recording my own music (!) Are the VIA
chipsets worse?

- Is it worth it to buy dual channel memory, or is it almost senseless
with an amd system (keep in mind that i use it for a lot of recording
and playing (realtim) so called softsynths. That means that i need a
very low latency time etc.) Or do you prefer to buy one single
memory-chip.. instead of two and use it as dual channel?

- Same question for serial ata. I read most of the time people don't
notice the difference. But does it have benefits with recording music
an stuff?? If not i can safe a few bucks....


thanks for all your reactions..

David